Considering updating to Gutsy Gibbon

[Paul S]

bill purvis said the following on 11/15/2007 10:25 AM:
> I decided today that I would upgrade to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), but when I
> started running the upgrade script it moaned that I didn't have enough
> space in /var. I had manually allocated space when I installed 7.04

the installer wants to download all the packages before updating any, 
and they are all to be stored in /var/cache/apt/archives.  You may free 
up some space by deleting any feisty packages already there (sudo rm 
/var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb) to help some.

> and considered that just under 1Gb was more than sufficient for my
> envisaged use, but it seems that the upgrade process requires well over
> 1Gb (on top of what I use) to do the upgrade. OK, I thought, I can get
> around that - allocate a further partition, copy /var into it, tweak
> /etc/fstab and reboot. No, running fdisk tells me there are no

did you try "sudo gparted"?  it should show your free space in addition 
to existing partitions.

> free sectors on my hard drive, despite there being loads of free
> space left when I allocated. It seems the install software only
> allocates the amount I've asked for for the extended partition,
> leaving the rest of the disk inaccessible. Is there any way around
> this?
> And by the way - what is the program used by the install process and
> can it be used on a live system (subject to the usual proviso that
> I don't alter any live partitions, of course)?

It's best to do it from an unmounted hard drive via a live CD.  But, I 
have used parted to change existing (unmounted) partitions further down 
the disk than the one I'm running.  Obviously, trying to change anything 
ahead of you on the disk is going to bring problems when you try to reboot.

> 
> Bill

  If you kill yourself, you might recover by using the liveCD to access 
your dead files.

HTH